The minefield of B2C legal marketing

If your law firm offers legal services to individuals, accurately tracking leads and conversions might seem a bit like a minefield.

Here’s why:

• You run a variety of campaigns across a number of different verticals e.g. PPI, Personal Injury, Personal Claims and Debt Recovery – and you want to know which one is the most profitable.
• Your firm has a considerable budget for marketing spread across a variety of advertising channels – which one is getting your phone to ring?
• Clients prefer to talk to you over the phone but you have no idea how they found you and what led to a conversion.
• And you need a way to be able to sort the genuine leads from the timewasters.

The main point being is that as a B2C law firm, you’re marketing a broad range of verticals across a variety of marketing channels – and you’re expected to split your budget several ways.

To make matters more confusing, your market share is pretty big too. According to a BBC News Report, the ombudsman showed that it received 42,195 PPI claims relating to one UK bank in the second half of 2013.

That figure alone suggests that there are a huge number of people out there for looking for only one area of your business. Couple this with your other verticals and that’s a hefty volume of prospects that could be picking up the phone to talk to you!

There is however, one simple, affordable tool that can put an end to your inbound lead analysis woes. It’s called call tracking.

Mediahawk’s call tracking technology will effortlessly sync your online and offline marketing and show you where you can spend the least to achieve the most. Here’s how it will tackle each issue mentioned above.

Streamline vertical advertising

Imagine your firm is running one TV ad during a lunchtime slot promising to get a settlement for a plethora of injury claims. You also run another ad at six o’clock in the evening urging people to contact you if they’ve been mis-sold PPI.

PPI and injury claims continue to be two of the biggest areas of business for law firms – but how would you know which area is driving the most amount of leads if you’ve used the same number for both ads. How would you know which messaging in these ads is empowering viewers to pick up the phone?

With call tracking, you can apply a unique phone number to both TV ads and evaluate which ad has had the most amount of calls over a certain period of time. If the call rate is drastically lower for one ad, you might need to think about revisiting your ads messaging or changing the time your ad is aired. This applies for other forms of advertising such as print advertising and digital advertising too. For example, you might find one print is performing better in one publication, and one PPC (Pay Per Click) ad has sparked far more enquiries than another.

Got a big budget? Find out where to invest it

You paid through the nose for that billboard advertising in town, but who cares how much it cost, it’s big and loads of people will see it, right?

You also run other advertising, like PPC, and a slot in the local newspaper. But you let these tick over because they cost next to nothing.

Business might be good, but this type of advertising strategy isn’t sustainable or efficient. What if I told you that your PPC ad attributed to 50% of calls and that expensive billboard ad contributed a little over 3% of enquiries? Not such a great investment was it.

If you’ve got a big budget, it’s not a good strategy to target every single advertising channel just because you’ve got the funds there.

If you want to maximise your firm’s budget, it’s necessary to track your investments and make adjustments accordingly, cutting any redundant, ineffective spend. Without call tracking, you won’t have a complete lead generation picture, so it’s almost impossible to carry out a thorough return on investment analysis without a call tracking solution.

The phone is essential for your service

Contact forms on a site are standard practice, but we’ve found that more genuine clients prefer to pick up the phone – therefore having a phone number across your advertising (online and offline) is essential if you want to make sure you’re immediately accessible for serious clients.

More importantly, you want to find out which area of your marketing may have initiated an inquiry, but the buying cycle can be a little confusing; here’s why:

A consumer may have looked at your ‘debt recovery’ web page, but didn’t feel ready to pick up the phone. A few days later, they feel ready to connect, so they make that call using your plain old business number.

If you had call tracking installed, the tool would have been able to generate a unique number for that visitor, and the call metrics would have tracked the pages they viewed and their individual interactions with your site. This sort of data can help you to refine your conversion process. There isn’t any other tool out there that can do this!

Call analysis: evaluate the lead

Call tracking also allows organisations to sort information by call types. This type of call data includes call length, caller ID and location, enabling you to quickly evaluate the call quality against the purpose of their call.

These types of metrics allow you to instantly make a decision as to whether you will push forward with a claim or not, saving you potentially hours of chasing up leads.

If you do decide to initiate a claim, you may provide a lot of legal advice over the phone, but without call analytics you won’t be able to track the time spent on the phone in order to accurately bill the client.

This is where the beauty of call metrics steps in – only available with a call tracking tool.

The significance of monitoring marketing and leads for law firms

So, now you know how complex it can be to monitor all four of these issues, there is one simple solution: call tracking.

It’s so easy too. Most law firms manage their account themselves all from one single dashboard. And as soon as the account is set up, your telephone numbers are immediately live, so you won’t waste any more time.